Spirits

But the gun still rattles, the gun still rattles, whoa. I’ve got guns in my head and they won’t go. Spirits in my head and they won’t go.

I have PTSD. I was diagnosed in January of this year, after having avoided going to a doctor for several months. At that point, my symptoms were rather unavoidable and likely nobody in my life was shocked to hear the diagnosis, at least not the people I’m closest to. I think I did a fairly good job of hiding it from others. They probably just thought I was flaky and cancelled most plans because I was depressed about my husband dying. But for the most part, if you spent even a short amount of time with me, you’d clearly see I wasn’t doing well.

Things you might have noticed about me:
-drinking (heavily for periods and then not at all for months)
-cancelling plans
-not keeping up with my appearance (like, at all)
-eating a lot or not much at all
-cancelling more plans
-avoiding your calls
-avoiding your emails
-avoiding social media for large spans of time
-cancelling more plans, if there were any left to cancel
-sitting and not interacting with anybody, even in the middle of a party
-sleeping in the middle of a big gathering (Yes, I could, and would, intentionally go to sleep on the couch in the living room while my friends were a mere 10 feet away singing and cooking in the kitchen. I wanted to be around them, but I couldn’t bear to speak to them.)
-jumping at the drop of a dime
-exhausted all the time

Things you might not have noticed about me (or maybe you have noticed and are too nice to mention it):
-my hood (If I can wear a hood over my head, I do.)
-can’t touch my face/head
-twitching
-twitching accompanied by noises
-sitting in the corner/back to the wall
-avoiding looking at Mark in pictures
-avoiding places that remind me of Mark
-hiding in my room
-lying on the floor (as flat against the floor as I can possibly get)
-hiding in the bathroom
-scanning the room for guns
-thinking anything long is a shotgun
-thinking any mass or pile on the ground is a dead body
-sleeping with a blanket over my head

Disclaimer: If you are concerned that you have PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), speak to a medical professional. I was diagnosed by my therapist, who is licensed to do so. Post-traumatic stress is a natural human reaction to a traumatic situation that usually resolves on its own. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is when it becomes a bit too much to manage on your own. (Specifically, you meet four main criteria that persist for a period of at least a month, and a medical professional is the one to assess this for you.) It’s treatable and not meant to be a permanent diagnosis; many people seek treatment and in a short amount of time reach a point when they are no longer living with PTSD.. In some cases, it is considered ‘chronic’, which also requires a medical professional’s diagnosis. With support and understanding, one can make a full recovery or, at a minimum, learn how to live with it such that it doesn’t rule their life. Either case is great.

PTSD is the reason I’m awake right now at 3:22am. My practice and willingness to deal with my PTSD is the reason that I’m blogging right now instead of hiding under my blanket having a panic attack.

*Note: I am semi-hiding, as is my preferred state. Picture me with my back to the wall and layers of blankets over my head with just my face and hands visible and glowing in the light of my laptop. I’ll stay this way, unless I HAVE to move, in which case I’ll spend as much time as it takes fidgeting with and readjusting the blanket (and sheet, because blanket + sheet = makeshift weighted blanket = anxiety-reducing magic) over my head so that they don’t pull my hood (my very necessary head protection) off my head, AND so that the blanket/sheet combo rests with just the right amount of veil to shield my periphery, as is essential.

Sensory overload is a great way to describe how PTSD feels, with the key being that everything you sense is distressing. It’s not uncommon to hear people with the disorder saying that they’re constantly ‘on edge’ or ‘afraid of everything’. You’ve probably heard reference to ‘fight, flight or freeze’ in conversations on this topic. Humans have evolved to handle intense and traumatic situations. In a moment of danger, we all respond with one of those F-words (And possibly another as it comes bellowing out of our mouths.) It’s how we survive.

Sometimes, when the experience is traumatic enough, we stay on guard. If you do this for long enough, your ability to distinguish between real and imagined danger gets rather blurry. Fortunately, humans are pretty good at realizing this, or at least we have others to point it out to us. We’re pretty good at self-correcting if we try. But some things are just really hard to deal with. Some things are so far outside the realm of ordinary human experience that they’re shocking to the system and everything we know to be true. That’s when PTSD occurs. It’s not hard to understand why it’s so prevalent among combat veterans, and it can happen to any of us who experience any sort of trauma.

One of my favorite quotes, whose original speaker escapes me, references how your trauma is not your fault, but it IS your responsibility. How very true this is. I did not kill my husband. I did not make him kill himself. I did not ask for his suicide, nor did I cause any of the residual devastation or the toll it took on every aspect of my life. But I AM responsible for handling the impact it has had on me. I can either be a victim of it or I can move forward to have a life that I love. While I do love a good pity party and believe that my adventures in suicide-widow dating might make for the greatest comedy routine that ever was, I don’t actually expect somebody else to deal with all of this FOR me.

Before actually reaching for my laptop, I started this post with thoughts about how I’m house- and dog-sitting for friends and feel like the only person in the world who is apparently NOT soothed by the dog lying at foot of the bed, but is instead woken by every noise said dog makes (Seriously, who licks that loudly???) and is primarily concerned that the dog will spontaneously combust or die of unknown causes, making me the worst dogsitter in the history of ever.

Get a dog, they said…. It’ll be great, they said…

But hey, I’ve got issues. My husband killed himself. He was mine. We made vows. In a sense, we swore to keep the other alive. I didn’t say that directly, but it was implied. Mark certainly would’ve kept me alive in dangerous situations. In fact, he probably did without my knowing. He was a Marine, so he was good at protecting and things like that. But at his worst, I failed to keep him alive. So many of us did. I do not blame myself for this. Mark made his own choices. But it’s not shocking that I have a complex about my ability to care for other living creatures given how extremely I failed to do so with my husband.

I thought, too, that maybe this post would go into detail about how tremendously overwhelming I find this house (and any other place that isn’t my bed where it meets the corner of my room). Again, I’m house- and dog-sitting for friends while they’re away. The house is pretty enormous, and this time I’m staying in the master suite, with all its windows, corners and walls around which I cannot see. I’ve done it before, though I stayed in a different room. Nobody is forcing me to be here. I practically jumped at the opportunity to do it again. I love a good adventure, and caring for their beautiful Great Dane while making sure the house doesn’t burn down is definitely an adventure. It’s not often I turn down a chance for some personal growth. Considering everything I thought I knew about life altered at the age of twenty-eight, and that I have since been rebuilding (and rising from the ashes like a glorious phoenix, if I do say so myself) and having to completely relearn this whole adulting business, caring for another living creature and managing a house on a temporary basis (and without having to do ANY of the prep work) seems like a good place to start.

Truly, all you people with kids and houses, managing all the things, you inspire (and intimidate) me. Managing my sleep was a full-time job for the better part of the last two and half years since Mark died. In fact, if it were a job, I would’ve been fired. It was that bad. But you’re all kicking ass at this adulting business, and it’s amazing. Bravo.

That said, I know you’ve got your own shit to deal with. I don’t envy you. I’m also well aware that most people don’t envy me and my circumstances. It didn’t take two and half years for me to figure that out; many of you were so confronted by it that you disappeared quite shortly after Mark killed himself. If that’s how you have to get through the day, I get it. No hard feelings. Like I said, I don’t want to deal with the crap you have to deal with either. And even if I did care, I don’t have the attention span for it.

Clearly, given I can’t even sleep without worrying there’s a gunman in the bathroom.

Dealing with PTSD has taught me to care very little about what others think. Actually, my husband’s suicide sort of took that aspect away from me the second he pulled the trigger, as evidenced by my behavior in the early days following his death. It wasn’t pretty, and to say I didn’t give a flying fuck what anybody thought about me is a gross understatement. I was a disaster, albeit a beautiful one. But that’s a blog for another day.

The important thing is that I’ve been able to blog this whole time instead of being paralyzed in bed by my incessant fears of being shot. It’s not a breakthrough for me to know that it’s highly unlikely that I will be shot in the head or attacked, or that somebody is going to pop up from behind and scare me at any given moment. Even in my worst days, when I had no control over the disconnect between my brain and my body, I knew none of that was likely. The key is how I deal with it. That I CAN deal with it.

Truth be told, I was thrilled when blogging came to mind at 2:42 this morning. Well, not exactly. At first, I was pissed when I looked at my phone and saw that, even after all the tossing and turning, not even four hours had passed since I’d “gone to sleep”. But once my frustration passed, my anxiety led to all these great ideas for this post, as previously mentioned. Then, in less than shocking news given my frequent inability to remember anything, I realized I’d actually started this one months ago and just never knew where to take it. It had been drafted (meaning I chose a song for its title) and sat waiting for me to finish it. Apparently, insomnia has its perks.

I had no idea when I first drafted this that it would turn into one of those blog posts that ends on a happy note with some sort of moral and message of hope, but there you have it.